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Well, we do have an example of a governmental agency that is free from political control, i.e. the federal reserve. We could have something like that for resear

Well, we do have an example of a governmental agency that is free from political control, i.e. the federal reserve. We could have something like that for research, can't we? After the appointment of a governor, the organization could function on its own without politics. Other examples include supreme court of the United States, BBC in the UK etc.

CWuestefeld 11y ago
a governmental agency that is free from political control, i.e. the federal reserve I'm not sure how much it affects the argument, but the Fed is not a governmental agency. It's a stand-alone corporation whose officers are appointed by the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
logfromblammo 11y ago
The problem is that the price system is the best resource allocation scheme that humans have ever attempted at scale. When you sever the external link between the product going out, and the money coming in, you destroy some of the positive or negative feedback loops that take into account what people actually want and what they can do. There has to be a hard external link between the outputs and the inputs, or you end up with a situation where rent-seekers charge in and gum up the works, absorbing resources without doing anything economically useful in exchange. The instant you guarantee a cash flow independent of actual results, you create sinecures, and those offices fill up and never go vacant again. You could end up with situations where the agency cures a disease, but spends 100 times more doing that than it would cost to develop an acceptably effective treatment and also create a foundation that could pay to produce and distribute that treatment to everyone who gets it any time within the next 5 billion years. Yay, woo, we cured it. But our inability to effectively prioritize resources meant that 99% of that cure budget was not spent on researching diseases that have a far greater economic impact. Oops. Someone has to decide whether the money is well spent. And if that someone isn't everyone, then there is an agency problem, and rent-seekers scramble over each other to be the someone, so they can easily profit from that decision-making power. Now, before anyone goes shaking their pompoms for the free market, I should mention that we haven't actually had one in medicine for a long time, thanks to the godawful market distortions that currently exist in the healthcare sector of markets where most treatments are researched. But at least that market-side link in the feedback loop still exists to some tiny extent, no matter how weak or tenuous it may be now. So an independent research agency would be great for about 15 years. After that, it will start to become a gigantic black hole of waste and inefficiency.

CWuestefeld 11y ago

a governmental agency that is free from political control, i.e. the federal reserve I'm not sure how much it affects the argument, but the Fed is not a governmental agency. It's a stand-alone corporation whose officers are appointed by the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

logfromblammo 11y ago

The problem is that the price system is the best resource allocation scheme that humans have ever attempted at scale. When you sever the external link between the product going out, and the money coming in, you destroy some of the positive or negative feedback loops that take into account what people actually want and what they can do. There has to be a hard external link between the outputs and the inputs, or you end up with a situation where rent-seekers charge in and gum up the works, absorbing resources without doing anything economically useful in exchange. The instant you guarantee a cash flow independent of actual results, you create sinecures, and those offices fill up and never go vacant again. You could end up with situations where the agency cures a disease, but spends 100 times more doing that than it would cost to develop an acceptably effective treatment and also create a foundation that could pay to produce and distribute that treatment to everyone who gets it any time within the next 5 billion years. Yay, woo, we cured it. But our inability to effectively prioritize resources meant that 99% of that cure budget was not spent on researching diseases that have a far greater economic impact. Oops. Someone has to decide whether the money is well spent. And if that someone isn't everyone, then there is an agency problem, and rent-seekers scramble over each other to be the someone, so they can easily profit from that decision-making power. Now, before anyone goes shaking their pompoms for the free market, I should mention that we haven't actually had one in medicine for a long time, thanks to the godawful market distortions that currently exist in the healthcare sector of markets where most treatments are researched. But at least that market-side link in the feedback loop still exists to some tiny extent, no matter how weak or tenuous it may be now. So an independent research agency would be great for about 15 years. After that, it will start to become a gigantic black hole of waste and inefficiency.